How Indigenous Sea Gardens Produced Massive Amounts of Food for Millennia
Metadata
Highlights
- By focusing on reciprocity and the common good—both for the community and the environment—sea gardening created bountiful food without putting populations at risk of collapse.
- To Salomon, who is involved in the Pacific Sea Garden Collective, the intensive nature of some Indigenous sea gardens is fundamentally different from the maximum sustained yield mindset of today’s capitalist commercial fisheries. Archaeological evidence, paired with Indigenous oral histories, Salomon says, shows how by focusing on common reciprocal, relationship-based principles and governance practices—ones that sustain individuals, communities, and their environments—Indigenous communities often made decisions that led to huge harvests while also putting some limits on the scale at which that intensification was happening.